During my 8 years of Linux on and off usage I have tried more distros than I have chocolate bars. Each one of my previous encounters meant that I had to spend at least 2 days configuring before I have a desktop that I was somewhat comfortable with. With Ubuntu Feisty Fawn's latest test beta --for the first time ever-- this was not the case. I was up and running with all the niceties I wanted within 2 hours.

Ubuntu doesn't come with smb or nfs by default. Like Eugenia said, you open up the networking config tool and it prompts to install nfs and/or smb. You don't "need to realise that portmap and nfs-common" are needed, unless I'm misreading something.